Calamander
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Apple didn't need AI -- but it did need China -- to beat analysts' doom and gloom
Also contrarian viewpoint - AI on phones may just not be that important.
What do we do on our phones every day?
- Chat with friends - primary use case
- Chat on work chat
- Take photos, look at photos, share photos
- Doom-scroll instagram, X, etc
- Use some shitty banking app bcause I have to
- Pay for things with the wallet credit card
- Use some crypto apps
That's 99.9% of my use of the phone.
See which of these activities are lacking AI? Or benefit from AI?
None.
Most of Apple's revenue is safe from a lack of AI.
Apple should get into cars and robots though, and use AI there of course. They should drop their silly VR glasses with no use case or no real life use.
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Apple didn't need AI -- but it did need China -- to beat analysts' doom and gloom
Apple is old and uncool but one thing they got going for them is they make great phones and even greater laptops and computers.That's ok for a tech company.
Steve Jobs promoted Tim Cook to CEO because Tim Cook is the money man - he is the reason for Apple's super high profit margins. And thanks to him the company keeps printing money. That's not bad.
I personally don't like how they're leaning more and more on services - the iPhone is serving me ads for AppleTV now, and I am sure this will lead to increased revenue in Apple TV serivces, which is why they will do more of it, until iOS is like Windows where they try to sell you stuff everywhere instead of letting me just use my phone please and I don't need or want Apple TV, now, or ever, I've got things to do.But you can't argue with the numbers. Most valuable company with the highest revenues and highest margins, all from making super good phones that are just that notch above the rest.
I just got a 16 for my son - he broke our old XS which was working perfectly for him for years. Part of choosing an iPhone over say Nothing Phone (3) is that at the same price level, with the 16 I know what I am getting - I am getting a device that will work great for the next 5 years, easy.
At this point at least in my family, iPhone is the tech equivalent of a Toyota - it just keeps running. The quality is something else. Also because they're so popular, getting it fixed here in Asia is easy and cheap - every shop has iPhone model batteries, screens, etc. I cracked my iPhone 11 Pro screen, had it fixed in an hour. Try getting a screen for a 5 year old Samsung etc... that won't happen.Quality is super impressive.
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Apple Product identifiers have leaked every Mac release through 2026
Apple Silicon are so much faster than these intel machines. It doesn't even compare.shadowself said:I'm running a maxed out 2019 Mac Pro (no, I don't have 1.5 TB of RAM!, but I have a lot). I run high end simulation software in MacOS, Windows 10, and Windows 11 depending on what the software requires.
I've been waiting on a new Mac Pro for some time. The last update effectively was a joke. The most recent Mac Studios were not much better.
If the next Mac Pro does not have at least an M4 Ultra (preferably an M5 Ultra) I may have to jump ship from using Mac hardware. As someone who has been using Apple hardware since the late 70s and Macs since 1984, jumping to some other platform will be painful. But if Apple is going to do something as stupid as come out with a Mac Pro with an M3 Ultra within the next six plus months, that means no Mac Pros acceptable to me before late 2027.
I can't keep using this old 2019 Mac Pro for 2 1/2 more years! Simulation software evolves and gets both CPU and GPU hungrier. Apple needs to keep up with its flagship machine.
I long for the days when the top of the line G4 Mac Pro was so fast (a lot faster than any Intel or AMD based machine). In fact it was so fast that for a short while the U.S. Government restricted the countries to which Apple could ship it. Apple needs to ship today's equivalent of that machine!
My colleagues are using M2 Macbook Air for development - with 8GB of RAM. Almost a joke, but the M chips are so fast, it's still faster than any Intel laptop ever was.
I think why it takes them so long to make these Ultra chips is because it's 2 Max chips fused together acting as one - that's a very complex design, and the sales of high end desktop machines are negligible. So they don't make a ton of money with these.
That being said, the memory bandwidth of the M class chips is like normal computers graphics cards - it's super high. You basically get up to 700GB of graphics card memory. That used to be a supercomputer not too long ago.
Get the Ultra Mac Studio or wait for the next Pro, either way, it's going to fly.
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Trump's 25% smartphone tariff starts just in time for the iPhone 17
Countries making iPhones
- India
- Vietnam
- Brazil
Soon: Indonesia - same thing they said you can't sell iPhones here if you don't make any here. Apple agreed to invest $1Bn.
But... the USA can't do it? So India can do it. Vietnam can do it. Brazil (high tech wonderland lol) can make iPhones.
Surely it's going to be a huge hassle to set up iPhone production in the USA, when nothing's been made here for decades. But in the long run, it will be a lot better for Apple. Apple also has north of 200Bn in cash stashed away, so they can afford it many times over to invest in plants here.
As it is, Apple is extremely reliant on China. China can basically do whatever it wants with Apple, and Apple has to say yes. Not a good position to be n.
Labor costs won't be an issue since plants can be 100% automated - as Xiaomi has shown.
SpaceX makes Starlink devices in Texas, Tesla cars in Californa and Texas, plus a giant automated gigafactory for batteries in Nevada. So yeah, absolutely, high tech can be made in the USA. I am not saying it's easy, or a piece of cake, but it can be done. Maybe Tim should ask Elon for advice...
PS: Xiaomi was copying Tesla for factory automation... Tesla factories are the most modern in the world. Elon invested a lot of time and energy in making them efficient to the point where they're better than anyone else's factories.
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Apple turns to Anthropic to speed up coding & fix buggy tools
Apple never got around to fix the XCode mess.digitol said:Xcode has been a horrible experience since day one. Provisioning is certain hell and full of issues. Debugger and so many errors it’s a joke. Paying to be a developer is ridiculous, essentially paying to run your own apps and being charged for a totally abandoned shotty experience is and has been pure hell. Oh but wait you can get a free dev account…. Sure good luck with that enjoy provisioning hell every so months. Lame & broken & you pay money for it! No thanks.
XCode is so bad there used to be a blog called "XCode said" which was just making fun of absurd XCode errors and behaviors.
Look at your project settings and you see a thousand avon b7 said:
Apple was (and still is) behind.foregoneconclusion said:LLM programs are relatively easy to develop. That's why there are so many different companies that offer their own LLM programs. It's really the training model that's important. The LLM is worthless without it. And the training model is mainly a euphemism for a gargantuan database. That gargantuan database can either be created ethically (verified sources with appropriate permissions) or unethically (unverified sources without permission).
So all the talk about Apple being "behind" in LLM based AI is mostly blather since the LLM part is largely inconsequential versus the database being used and whether it's legal.
We need to accept that. There is enough evidence of that now.
They didn't have anything when Gen AI came to market. They deliberately avoided any mention of 'AI' at the WWDC when people were expecting to hear about it and deliberately chose to refer to ML instead. The following year (and now unable to avoid the term due to all the progress made by Gen AI) we got 'Apple Intelligence' but zero of that shipped on the 2024 AI iPhone. It was to come out over the release cycle of iOS.
Almost all previous phones were not elegible for Apple Intelligence (another HUGE sign that AI of this kind just wasn't on the front burner until it was far too late). Then we got news of the delay to the enhanced Siri and then news of the AI executive shakeup. Then we got rumours of Apple trying to create its own AI training hardware but together with reports saying it was buying Nvidia hardware. If they truly weren't behind they would have had at least a plan to have everything in place long before now.
Nothing in all of this points to Apple being even remotely catching up with the almost daily upgrades to swatches of LLMs and Tiny LLMs.
No doubt it is desperately doing all it can but that doesn't mean it's not behind.
LLMs are anything but inconsequential as without them the data they feed off is just that - data.
Yes. There are ongoing debates and even challenges as to the ethical and legal aspects and they may prove consequential down the line but that has nothing to do with what is (and has been) available today. The current state of play.
This year's WWDC is going to be interesting for many reasons and AI is going to be one of them.
I'm not a fan of Gruber but he did ruffle some feathers and point out some uncomfortable Apple Intelligence truths.
I use Perplexity Pro which has proven to be ultra reliable for my needs. If Siri ever reaches that level it would be a true milestone.
Apple being behind in AI is not really the big problem - check out xAI and how fast they came from 0 to competing with the best models for the crown!
It took them less than a year!
Apple doesn't have anyone like Elon who has the vision, attracts the people, and executes - Apple is run by a bunch of pensioners whose only reason for still being there is they made a promise to their friend Steve Jobs on his deathbed.
It worked for a while but Apple desperately needs to find its vision - and dump the vision Pro, one of the most laughable, most expensive, C-suite nonsense ideas I've ever seen. The amount of research that has gone into this totally useless thing is crazy - talent that could be used to make a car, or figure out AI, things that actually matter. They have no plan.
